Ayn Rand and the United States Court of Elitism: A strange symbiosis (Part 1).

• Author: Normey, Rob

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Part one of this two-part series reviews Ayn Rand's views and novels, to help us understand her influence on the United States Supreme Court.

OPINION | The views expressed in this article are those of the author.

Part One: Who are Howard Roark and Judge Narragansett?

At the end of August 2022, Senator Bernie Sanders gave a rousing speech to British workers who are attempting to defend their rights (watch the video on YouTube). Sanders paraphrased the abolitionist and human rights advocate Frederick Douglass on the importance of struggle in the fight for equality of all citizens. In his West Indian Emancipation Speech of 1857, Douglass stated: "If there is no struggle, there is no progress. ... Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will."

As Sanders points out, workers and ordinary Americans wishing to see their votes count in upcoming elections face a growing oligarchical structure of wealth and power and political influence. The top three multi-billionaire families own more wealth than the bottom half of American society--that is, of 165 million ordinary citizens. In the last few decades--an age of "extreme capitalism" in the U.S.--the wide spread of wealth and political power has grown to its current dangerous state.

Ayn Rand's Individualism

There are few American writers and proponents of extreme capitalism from a radical right perspective besides novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand. She was born in Russia in 1905, immigrated to the United States in 1928 and passed away in 1982. Rand eventually became a screenwriter and noted enemy of left-wing writers, who were prominent for a brief time in Hollywood before the "Red Scare" and McCarthyism took their toll. Her hatred of Soviet Communism extended to all writers and thinkers, including political and legal thinkers who opposed her vehement views on the sanctity of unregulated markets and the "persecution" of the real makers of wealth (big businessmen and their corporations).

Rand adapted some of the German philosopher Nietzsche's views to her concept of the Ubermensch (Superman or Overman). She believed in freeing the hands of the major producers--businessmen--from the "second raters" and "looters" (to use terms of abuse she regularly employed in her novels). She promoted a form of individualism in a country known for such trait. However, when reading her novels, one quickly learns she is dead serious about super-sizing the concept of individualism.

It is clear from 2005's Ayn Rand Answers that all who oppose her positions on individualism, her hatred of altruism, and her belief that any restraint on "free markets" and the ability of powerful individuals to...